Michelle—thanks very much for a wise, insightful, and accurate post, that candidly acknowledges the many pros, cons, and tradeoffs of parenting.
As a dad with kids that range from 10 months old to over 25 years old, I agree with almost everything you wrote. EAs might also be interested in my ‘AMA about parenting’ from a few months ago here.
I would emphasize a few points that might lead currently-childless EAs to over-estimate the actual career costs of having kids, and to under-estimate the career and life benefits.
First, having mentored many grad students and young academics, I’ve observed that many young adults have a cognitive bias to over-estimate their likely career impact and success—especially in ‘winner-take-all’ careers where ‘many are called, but few are chosen’. So, young adults tend to compare apples to oranges—their idealized, best-possible-case future (childless) EA career, vs. their realistic, maximum-likelihood parenting career. When making these decisions, it’s important not to do that, but to compare the maximum-likelihood childless career (i.e. OK, but somewhat disappointing middle-aged outcomes compared to youthful ambitions) with the maximum-likelihood parenting career (i.e. probably also OK, and maybe 20% less glamorous, but with loving kids). The idealized outcomes, to a first approximation, simply won’t happen.
Second, having kids can be enormously motivating in terms of generating the income and financial security required to buy a house, pay for childcare, and pay for schooling. Personal anecdote: I had a modest book contract with MIT Press from about 1992 through 1996, to write a book based on my PhD dissertation. I didn’t write it. I dilly-dallied. Then my daughter was born in 1996, and I thought ‘Oh no we need the money to buy a house’, and I got a new agent, switched to a more mainstream trade publisher, got a much bigger advance, bought a house, and wrote the book within about 18 months. Many such cases. Granted, maximizing income for parenting isn’t the same as maximizing EA career impact. But they are correlated.
Third, it’s important to be realistic about what you’d actually be giving up in terms of time and energy if you have kids. As my old mentor, game theorist Ken Binmore used to say in the 1990s, ‘In the real world, most new commitments have only one opportunity cost: you get to watch a little less TV’. Nowadays, that could be updated to ‘you get to watch a little less YouTube, and post less on Twitter’. If you take a realistic inventory of how you actually spend your time, and eliminate a lot of the things that you’d no longer do if you were morally accountable to a partner for doing a reasonable share of the co-parenting, that’s what you’ll actually be giving up.
Fourth, having kids usually occurs in the context of some sort of long-term pair-bond (e.g. marriage), and it qualitatively changes those pair-bonds, often in ways that increase life-stability, even at the expense of day-to-day efficiency. For example, if you have kids with someone, you’re more likely to stick with them, rather than drifting off into the next relationship. As evolutionary biologists observe, there’s a fundamental life-history trade-off between ‘mating effort’ (to attract the next mate) and ‘parenting effort’ (to invest in kids with an existing mate). A lot of what young people think is career effort actually, in retrospect, after they have kids, turns out to have been mating effort.
Finally, a potentially controversial point about career impact: many parents simply don’t trust childless adults, and don’t take their views seriously. I think that many parents instinctively view adults without kids as defectors rather than cooperators in the Game of Life. They see the childless as having no ‘skin in the game’, in terms of the long-term interests of our culture, nation, civilization, or species. This may be especially true for parents who are culturally traditionalist, politically conservative, and/or religiously affiliated—i.e. the majority of humanity we’re trying to reach. Frankly, a lot of what young, childless EAs say strikes parents as immature, naive, and misguided. When an EA says ‘I’m happy giving away everything over $35k/year, and anything above that has rapidly diminishing marginal returns to my happiness’, parents hear ‘Hello I’m a childless single person who doesn’t understand real estate, transport, child care, schooling, marriage, or financial security’. When an AI alignment researcher says ‘It’ll be OK for humans to be replaced by AGIs, because it doesn’t matter what form sentience takes’, parents hear ‘Hello I’ll never have any kids or grand-kids, so I don’t actually care about humanity’. Long story short, one salient failure mode for EA is for EAs without kids to preach to parents with kids about things that only parents with kids can understand.… Thus, if we’re serious about EA being taken seriously by parents, it might help if more EAs become parents.
On your last point, since there are now quite a lot of EAs who are parents, disproportionately senior EAs, I would think we would be well into the diminishing returns in terms of having advocates who parents with that perspective would take seriously?
I think, on the one hand, there are quite a few senior EAs who do have kids (and more every year!), and that’s good.
On the other hand, I think a lot of prominent public-facing EAs still don’t have kids, and promote ideas and values in ways that they might do a bit differently if they were parents.
For example, EA Forum, EA Global meetings, 80k Hours podcasts, etc seem to be relatively childless as a sort of ‘young EA default’. And I imagine that this public-facing EA culture could be somewhat off-putting to potential EAs who are parents.
Apart from the examples I gave above (re. alleged diminishing marginal returns to income over $35k, and long-termist transhumanism that sounds bizarre to parents), I can also imagine parents bristling at the practicality of hard-core ethical veganism (given limited control over what day cares & schools feed to their kids, limited vegan options on restaurant children’s menus, etc), or resenting the assumption (which seems common in 80k Hours advice) that all EA career decisions are being made by young single childless EAs with no geographical ties anywhere, or parents with teens worried about their education and careers feeling unhappy about AI advocates brushing aside all concerns about ‘technological unemployment’. (As a parent with a 26-year-old daughter who’s a professional artist, for example, I feel fairly pissed off at EAs who celebrate AI art replacing human artists.)
But, these are all rather vague personal impressions, and I’m open to any relevant data or other observations.
In general, I’m just making a plea that EA might be more effective at recruiting and retaining parents if existing parents in EA point out some ways that EA culture is unwittingly ignoring or marginalizing our concerns and perspectives.
I wonder if this is that we’re looking at the same numbers and seeing them differently, or whether we think the numbers are different?
If I think of the ten most well known EAs (not sharing the list because I don’t want to be ranking people), 5 are parents. Looking through Wikipedia:People_associated_with_effective_altruism I count 32 people, of which I recognize 8 as parents (and others may be). Of the top 50 posters by karma I recognize (a mostly different) [EDIT: nine] as parents, but there are a lot I don’t know the parental status of.
EA Forum, EA Global meetings, 80k Hours podcasts, etc seem to be relatively childless
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘childless’ here? I agree there aren’t many children participating in these spaces, but that’s also normal in the broader world. Do you mean that we don’t talk about children much? That it’s common for people to assume the audience doesn’t have kids?
AI advocates brushing aside all concerns about ‘technological unemployment’
I see people digging into this and comparing it to other risks, not brushing it aside. For example, here’s Holden (a parent!) making the case that by the time you get much technological unemployment you probably have much larger disruptions.
Hi Jeff—thanks for these numbers; you probably know the EA community better than I do, and have been actively engaged as an ‘EA parent’ longer than I have.
I acknowledge that a significant proportion of EAs have kids (e.g. at least 5⁄10 top 10 well-known EAs, 8⁄32 top wiki EA-associated people, 8⁄50 top EA Forum karma people). But, worldwide, it looks like about 70-80% of mature adults have kids at some point, so EAs might be on the lower end of having kids, and/or skew younger.
But, when I referred to the EA culture as seeming ‘relatively childless’, I was thinking more in terms of the culture, norms, and perspectives that shape EA values and messaging—not the relative lack of kids appearing on EA podcasts or at EA events.
I don’t expect parents in EA to talk about their kids a lot—which becomes very tedious to non-parents. Rather, I’m concerned that having kids in EA might be seen as a decision that requires some special ethical justification or career rationale or impact assessment, rather than as a normal thing that human creatures do after they sexually mature, find mates, and settle down.
Sorry if my tone came across as tendentious; it seems like we probably agree about most of this!
Michelle—thanks very much for a wise, insightful, and accurate post, that candidly acknowledges the many pros, cons, and tradeoffs of parenting.
As a dad with kids that range from 10 months old to over 25 years old, I agree with almost everything you wrote. EAs might also be interested in my ‘AMA about parenting’ from a few months ago here.
I would emphasize a few points that might lead currently-childless EAs to over-estimate the actual career costs of having kids, and to under-estimate the career and life benefits.
First, having mentored many grad students and young academics, I’ve observed that many young adults have a cognitive bias to over-estimate their likely career impact and success—especially in ‘winner-take-all’ careers where ‘many are called, but few are chosen’. So, young adults tend to compare apples to oranges—their idealized, best-possible-case future (childless) EA career, vs. their realistic, maximum-likelihood parenting career. When making these decisions, it’s important not to do that, but to compare the maximum-likelihood childless career (i.e. OK, but somewhat disappointing middle-aged outcomes compared to youthful ambitions) with the maximum-likelihood parenting career (i.e. probably also OK, and maybe 20% less glamorous, but with loving kids). The idealized outcomes, to a first approximation, simply won’t happen.
Second, having kids can be enormously motivating in terms of generating the income and financial security required to buy a house, pay for childcare, and pay for schooling. Personal anecdote: I had a modest book contract with MIT Press from about 1992 through 1996, to write a book based on my PhD dissertation. I didn’t write it. I dilly-dallied. Then my daughter was born in 1996, and I thought ‘Oh no we need the money to buy a house’, and I got a new agent, switched to a more mainstream trade publisher, got a much bigger advance, bought a house, and wrote the book within about 18 months. Many such cases. Granted, maximizing income for parenting isn’t the same as maximizing EA career impact. But they are correlated.
Third, it’s important to be realistic about what you’d actually be giving up in terms of time and energy if you have kids. As my old mentor, game theorist Ken Binmore used to say in the 1990s, ‘In the real world, most new commitments have only one opportunity cost: you get to watch a little less TV’. Nowadays, that could be updated to ‘you get to watch a little less YouTube, and post less on Twitter’. If you take a realistic inventory of how you actually spend your time, and eliminate a lot of the things that you’d no longer do if you were morally accountable to a partner for doing a reasonable share of the co-parenting, that’s what you’ll actually be giving up.
Fourth, having kids usually occurs in the context of some sort of long-term pair-bond (e.g. marriage), and it qualitatively changes those pair-bonds, often in ways that increase life-stability, even at the expense of day-to-day efficiency. For example, if you have kids with someone, you’re more likely to stick with them, rather than drifting off into the next relationship. As evolutionary biologists observe, there’s a fundamental life-history trade-off between ‘mating effort’ (to attract the next mate) and ‘parenting effort’ (to invest in kids with an existing mate). A lot of what young people think is career effort actually, in retrospect, after they have kids, turns out to have been mating effort.
Finally, a potentially controversial point about career impact: many parents simply don’t trust childless adults, and don’t take their views seriously. I think that many parents instinctively view adults without kids as defectors rather than cooperators in the Game of Life. They see the childless as having no ‘skin in the game’, in terms of the long-term interests of our culture, nation, civilization, or species. This may be especially true for parents who are culturally traditionalist, politically conservative, and/or religiously affiliated—i.e. the majority of humanity we’re trying to reach. Frankly, a lot of what young, childless EAs say strikes parents as immature, naive, and misguided. When an EA says ‘I’m happy giving away everything over $35k/year, and anything above that has rapidly diminishing marginal returns to my happiness’, parents hear ‘Hello I’m a childless single person who doesn’t understand real estate, transport, child care, schooling, marriage, or financial security’. When an AI alignment researcher says ‘It’ll be OK for humans to be replaced by AGIs, because it doesn’t matter what form sentience takes’, parents hear ‘Hello I’ll never have any kids or grand-kids, so I don’t actually care about humanity’. Long story short, one salient failure mode for EA is for EAs without kids to preach to parents with kids about things that only parents with kids can understand.… Thus, if we’re serious about EA being taken seriously by parents, it might help if more EAs become parents.
On your last point, since there are now quite a lot of EAs who are parents, disproportionately senior EAs, I would think we would be well into the diminishing returns in terms of having advocates who parents with that perspective would take seriously?
Hi Jeff—thanks for your comment.
I think, on the one hand, there are quite a few senior EAs who do have kids (and more every year!), and that’s good.
On the other hand, I think a lot of prominent public-facing EAs still don’t have kids, and promote ideas and values in ways that they might do a bit differently if they were parents.
For example, EA Forum, EA Global meetings, 80k Hours podcasts, etc seem to be relatively childless as a sort of ‘young EA default’. And I imagine that this public-facing EA culture could be somewhat off-putting to potential EAs who are parents.
Apart from the examples I gave above (re. alleged diminishing marginal returns to income over $35k, and long-termist transhumanism that sounds bizarre to parents), I can also imagine parents bristling at the practicality of hard-core ethical veganism (given limited control over what day cares & schools feed to their kids, limited vegan options on restaurant children’s menus, etc), or resenting the assumption (which seems common in 80k Hours advice) that all EA career decisions are being made by young single childless EAs with no geographical ties anywhere, or parents with teens worried about their education and careers feeling unhappy about AI advocates brushing aside all concerns about ‘technological unemployment’. (As a parent with a 26-year-old daughter who’s a professional artist, for example, I feel fairly pissed off at EAs who celebrate AI art replacing human artists.)
But, these are all rather vague personal impressions, and I’m open to any relevant data or other observations.
In general, I’m just making a plea that EA might be more effective at recruiting and retaining parents if existing parents in EA point out some ways that EA culture is unwittingly ignoring or marginalizing our concerns and perspectives.
I wonder if this is that we’re looking at the same numbers and seeing them differently, or whether we think the numbers are different?
If I think of the ten most well known EAs (not sharing the list because I don’t want to be ranking people), 5 are parents. Looking through Wikipedia:People_associated_with_effective_altruism I count 32 people, of which I recognize 8 as parents (and others may be). Of the top 50 posters by karma I recognize (a mostly different) [EDIT: nine] as parents, but there are a lot I don’t know the parental status of.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘childless’ here? I agree there aren’t many children participating in these spaces, but that’s also normal in the broader world. Do you mean that we don’t talk about children much? That it’s common for people to assume the audience doesn’t have kids?
I see people digging into this and comparing it to other risks, not brushing it aside. For example, here’s Holden (a parent!) making the case that by the time you get much technological unemployment you probably have much larger disruptions.
Hi Jeff—thanks for these numbers; you probably know the EA community better than I do, and have been actively engaged as an ‘EA parent’ longer than I have.
I acknowledge that a significant proportion of EAs have kids (e.g. at least 5⁄10 top 10 well-known EAs, 8⁄32 top wiki EA-associated people, 8⁄50 top EA Forum karma people). But, worldwide, it looks like about 70-80% of mature adults have kids at some point, so EAs might be on the lower end of having kids, and/or skew younger.
But, when I referred to the EA culture as seeming ‘relatively childless’, I was thinking more in terms of the culture, norms, and perspectives that shape EA values and messaging—not the relative lack of kids appearing on EA podcasts or at EA events.
I don’t expect parents in EA to talk about their kids a lot—which becomes very tedious to non-parents. Rather, I’m concerned that having kids in EA might be seen as a decision that requires some special ethical justification or career rationale or impact assessment, rather than as a normal thing that human creatures do after they sexually mature, find mates, and settle down.
Sorry if my tone came across as tendentious; it seems like we probably agree about most of this!